Hi. I have just started my journey. How do I direct incoming traffic to my minipc? I have received a static ip from my isp but their router does not have any settings exposed to end users. Is this possible to do without touching the router?
Edit: Thanks all for valuable feedbacks. The router they provided had a different superadmin account which had the settings like NAT, DMZ etc. Also it is able to work in bridge mode. So I can add my own router if I need some additional functionality. Will be tinkering a lot in coming days. So hopefully, I get some more insights into it.
By default a router would reject all incoming connections. Your alternatives are:
- Configure the ISP router to forward a port.
- Configure the ISP router to set your own router or PC as DMZ, which means forwarding all connections.
- Configure the ISP router to work in bridge mode rather than router mode, meaning it will act as if it wasn’t there (but will still login to the ISP connection) and let your own router or PC handle things.
- If you cannot configure the ISP router in any way, only solution remains to replace it with your own router. Whether this will work depends on how it connects to the ISP (both the physical connection type and the login).
It doesn’t make sense for the ISP to allocate a static public IP without letting you make any configuration to use it, so perhaps talk to them to figure out your options.
In addition, you don’t need a static IP in order for you to get access to your home network. It helps if you don’t want to run a script to auto-update your DNS, but not required.
Focus on port forwarding because that’s going to be the key to getting secured access.
Thanks a lot for the info. It let me to the solution. Talking to ISP about above settings, I was made aware of another superadmin account for router that made it possible.